Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (68 page)

Petit-Claud studied David’s fine face – that of a thinker – as he sat opposite him in an arm-chair, without listening to his account of matters with which he was more familiar than the man who was explaining them. Noticing Séchard’s anxious air as he entered, he had said to himself: ‘We’ve done the trick!’ Such a scene is often enacted in a lawyer’s office. Petit-Claud was wondering: ‘Why are the Cointets persecuting him?’ It is part of the mentality of solicitors to pierce through to the innermost thoughts of their clients as well as those of their adversaries: they have to see both back and front of the judicial weft.

‘You want to gain time,’ Petit-Claud at last answered when David had finished. ‘How much time? Something like three or four months?’

‘Get me four months and I shall be saved!’ cried David, who looked on Petit-Claud as a ministering angel.

‘Very well. They shall not lay hands on any of your furniture, and they shall not arrest you for three or four months… But it will cost a lot of money,’ Petit-Claud added.

‘Oh! What does that matter?’ cried Séchard.

‘You’re expecting payments to come in? Are you sure of them?’ the solicitor asked, almost surprised at his client’s readiness to fall into the trap set for him.

‘In three months’ time I shall be a rich man,’ the inventor replied, with all the self-assurance of an inventor.

‘Your father’s not yet in the churchyard,’ said Petit-Claud. ‘He prefers to remain in his vineyard.’

‘Do you think I’m counting on my father’s death?’ David replied. ‘I’m on the track of an industrial process which,
without one thread of cotton, will enable me to manufacture a kind of paper as substantial as Holland paper at fifty per cent of the present cost of cotton pulp….’

‘That means a fortune,’ exclaimed Petit-Claud, at last tumbling to tall Cointet’s plot.

‘A great fortune, my friend, for in the next ten years ten times the amount of paper consumed today will be needed. In our century journalism is going to become a mania.’

‘No one knows your secret?…’

‘No one, except my wife.’

‘You have not divulged your project, your programme to anyone… to the Cointets for example?’

‘I told them about it, but only in vague terms, I believe!’

A flash of generosity shot through the embittered soul of Petit-Claud, and he made an attempt at reconciling interests, those of the Cointets, his own, and David’s.

‘Listen, David. We are old school friends. I’ll stand up for you. But make no mistake: your defence against legal pursuit will cost you five or six thousand francs!… Don’t run the risk of losing your fortune. I believe you’ll be obliged to share the profits of your invention with one of our manufacturers. Come now! You’ll think twice about it before you buy or build a paper-factory… Besides, you’ll have to take out a patent… All that will take time and money. Maybe the bailiffs will swoop down on you too soon in spite of the evasive action we’re going to take…’

‘No, I’ll stick to my secret!’ David replied with all the ingenuousness of a scientist.

‘Well, your secret will be your life-line,’ Petit-Claud continued, thwarted in his first, his honest intention to avoid a law-suit by compromise. ‘I don’t ask to know what it is. But mark my words: try to work underground. Let no one see you or get an inkling of your process of manufacture, or else your life-line will be torn from your grasp… An inventor is often a simpleton at bottom. You will be thinking too much of your secret process to be able to think of everything. Sooner or later people will suspect the purposes of your researches, and you have paper-manufacturers all around you!
You’ll be like a beaver hemmed in by hunters: don’t let them get your skin!’

‘Thank you, my dear friend. I have told myself all that,’ Séchard exclaimed. ‘But I’m grateful to you for showing so much caution and solicitude!… I’m not the only person concerned in this venture. I myself could be content with twelve hundred francs a year, and some day my father will surely leave me at least three times that amount… My life is taken up with loving and thinking – a blissful life… My concern is for Lucien and my wife, and it’s for them I’m working…’

‘Come on then, sign me this power of attorney, and give your mind only to your researches. When the day comes for you to go into hiding to avoid arrest, I’ll warn you the day before. And let me tell you this: don’t let anyone inside your house unless you’re as sure of them as you are of yourself.’

‘Cérizet has refused to renew his lease for the running of my press, and that’s why we’re a bit worried about money. So the only persons I have left are Marion, Kolb who’s like a watch-dog for me, my wife and my mother-in-law.’

‘Take my advice,’ said Petit-Claud. ‘Don’t trust even your watch-dog.’

‘You don’t know him,’ David exclaimed. ‘Kolb is like a second self to me.’

‘Will you let me put him to the test?’

‘Yes,’ said Séchard.

‘Well, good-bye. But send the charming Madame Séchard along to me: I simply must have power of attorney from her. And reflect upon this, my friend: your house is on fire.’ By saying this to his old schoolfellow, Petit-Claud was warning him of all the judicial catastrophes which were about to descend on him.

A prey to the vexations due to lack of money, a prey to the worry caused by his wife’s state of mind – reduced to despair as she was by Lucien’s infamous conduct – David
was still pondering over his problem. It had so happened that, as he was on his way from his house to see Petit-Claud, he had absent-mindedly been chewing a nettle stalk which he had steeped in water as a means for somehow or other retting the stalks he was using as material for his pulp. He was trying to find a process equivalent to the various kinds of attrition effected by soaking, by weaving or by ordinary wear-and-tear on anything of which the end-product is thread, linen or rag-stuff. As he made his way home, quite satisfied with his talk with Petit-Claud, he realized that he had a ball of pulp in his mouth. He took it out, rolled it out in his hand, and found that it made a better pulp than any of the compounds he had produced hitherto; for the principal defect in pulps made from vegetable matter is that they lack adhesiveness. Straw for instance produces a brittle, half metallic and rustling paper. Chance discoveries like this are only made by bold researchers into natural causes.

He told himself that he would use a machine and a chemical agent to carry out the operation which he had just accomplished automatically. And he appeared before his wife in a state of jubilation, believing that he had scored a triumph.

‘My angel, don’t worry any more!’ said David, noticing that his wife had been crying. ‘Petit-Claud guarantees us a few months’ respite. There will be expenses but, as he said when he showed me out, all Frenchmen have the right to keep their creditors waiting provided that in the long run they repay capital, interest and costs!… Well, we’ll do that.’

‘And keep alive?’ said the unhappy Eve, who saw all the difficulties ahead.

‘Ah! That’s a point!’ David answered, pulling at his ear – an inexplicable gesture, but one customary with all people who find themselves in a quandary.

‘Mother will take charge of our little Lucien and I can go back to work,’ said Eve.

‘Eve! My beloved Eve!’ David exclaimed, taking his wife into his arms and clasping her to his heart. ‘Eve, a short distance away from here, at Saintes, in the sixteenth century, lived one of France’s greatest men, for he was not only the
inventor of enamelling, but also the glorious forerunner of Buffon and Cuvier: a simple-hearted man who discovered the science of geology before they did! Well, this man, Bernard de Palissy, was a passionate enthusiast for research. But he had his wife, his children and all the neighbours of his quarter against him. His wife made him pay her for his tools… He wandered about the countryside misunderstood and hounded, and people pointed their fingers at him!… Whereas
I
have a wife who loves me!’

‘Loves you very much,’ Eve replied with the serene accents expressive of love which is sure of itself.

‘So then I can put up with everything that Bernard de Palissy had to put up with: the man who made the faience of Ecouen, the man whom Charles the Ninth saved from the Saint Bartholomew massacres and who, in the end, when he was old, but rich and loaded with honours, gave public lectures to the whole of Europe on ‘the science of clays’, as he called it.

‘So long as my hand has strength enough to hold a smoothing-iron you shall want for nothing!’ poor Eve exclaimed in accents expressive of the deepest devotion. ‘At the time when I was Madame Prieur’s forewoman I was friendly with a very good girl, a cousin of Postel, Basine Clerget. Well, Basine has just told me, when she brought home the laundry, that she is taking over from Madame Prieur. I’ll go back and work for her!’

‘You won’t stay there long!’ David exclaimed. ‘I’ve found what I was after…’

For the first time, the sublime certainty of success which keeps inventors in good heart and encourages them to press on in the virgin forest of the land of discovery was greeted by Eve with a smile which was almost sad. David’s head drooped in a gesture of despondency.

‘Oh my dear! I’m not mocking or laughing at you. I’m not doubting you,’ said the lovely Eve, falling on her knees before her husband. ‘But I do see how right you were to be very secretive about your experiments and hopes. Yes, my dear, an inventor must hide from everyone the pai
n̄
ful travail
which is to lead him to glory, even from his wife. A wife is always a wife. Your Eve has been unable to refrain from smiling on hearing you say, for the seventeenth time in the last month: “At last I’ve got it!”’

David began to laugh so heartily at himself that Eve took his hand and reverently kissed it. It was a moment of delight: one of those roses, symbolic of love and tenderness, which one finds blooming alongside the most arid paths of misery, and sometimes even at the bottom of a precipice.

‘If I give my son a chance to put his hand to my lips… I mean to the edge of my cash-box… he’d push it right down
into my guts and drain them dry. All children have an itch to get their fingers into their father’s purse… How did
I
manage? I never cost my parents a farthing. Your printing-works isn’t a going concern. The only printing that’s done there is by the rats and mice… You’re a pretty girl, you are, and I like you. You’re a careful, hard-working wife. But what about my son?… You’d like to know what David is? I’ll tell you. He’s a good-for-nothing, a scholar I If I’d left him to himself as I was left to myself and not had him taught reading and writing, if I’d made a “bear” of him like his Dad was, he’d be drawing interest now on his capital. Oh, he’s my cross in life, that lad is. It’s pity he’s the only one: I’m too old to pull off another copy! What’s worse, he’s making you unhappy.’

Eve’s gesture at this was a protest of absolute denial. ‘Yes he is,’ he went on in answer to this gesture. ‘You’ve had to take a wet-nurse because worry has dried up your milk. You see, I know all about it! You’ve been taken to court and the whole town’s shouting about it. I was only a “bear”. I’m no scholar. I never had a foreman’s job at the Didots, a first-rate printing-firm. But I’ve never had a summons! D’you know what I say to myself as I work away in my vineyard, looking after the vines and picking the grapes and doing my little jobs? I say to myself: “You poor old fool. You’re slaving yourself to death pinching and scraping, and you’ll have a fine lot of property. Well, it’ll all go to the bailiffs and lawyers… or else be chucked away on hare-brained ideas.” See here, my girl, you’re the mother of that little boy who looked to me just the spit of his grandfather when I was holding him at the font with Madame Chardon. Well, think less about Séchard and more about that little scamp… You’re the only one I put any trust in… You could stop him frittering away my goods and chattels, the poor little bit I’ve saved up…’

‘But my dear Papa Séchard, your son will be your pride and glory. One day he’ll make a fortune for himself and he’ll have the Cross of the Legion of Honour at his buttonhole.’

‘How’s he going to get that?’ the vine-grower asked.

‘You’ll see! But in the meantime three thousand francs wouldn’t ruin you… With three thousand francs you could
put an end to this law-suit… All right, if you’ve no confidence in him, lend them to me. You’ll get them back. I’ll give you a mortgage on my dowry, on the work I’m going to do…’

‘So David Séchard’s being sued!’ the vine-grower exclaimed, astonished to learn that what he had supposed to be a slander was the truth. ‘That’s what comes of being able to sign your name! And what about my rent?… Very well, young woman, I’ll have to go to Angoulême to get things straight and have a talk with my lawyer, Maître Cachan… You did right to come here… Forewarned is forearmed!’

After a debate lasting two hours Eve was obliged to go off defeated by the unanswerable argument: ‘Women know nothing about business.’ She had gone there with a vague hope of success; she was almost a broken woman as she made her way back from Marsac to Angoulême. She reached home just in time to receive notice of the judgement ordering Séchard to pay Métivier in full. In the provinces, even to have a process-server at one’s door is an event, but Doublon had been coming much too often recently for tongues not to be wagging in the neighbourhood. Consequently Eve no longer dared leave her house for fear of hearing people whispering as she went by.

‘Oh! My brother, my brother!’ the poor woman cried as she rushed through the alley and went upstairs. ‘I could only forgive you if it had been a question of…’

‘Alas!’ said David as he came to meet her. ‘It
was
a question of avoiding suicide.’

‘Then let’s say no more about it ever,’ she replied in a gentle tone. ‘The woman who took him off into the maelstrom of Paris is criminally to blame!… And your father, David, is absolutely pitiless!… We must suffer in silence.’

A timid knock on the door cut short a tender remark which was on David’s lips, and Marion presented herself dragging the tall, sturdy Kolb through the first room.

‘Madame,’ she said. ‘Kolb and I knew that Monsieur and Madame were in a big fix. We have eleven hundred francs saved up between us. We thought that they couldn’t be better invested than with Madame…’

‘Viz Matame,’ Kolb repeated with enthusiasm.

‘Kolb!’ cried David Séchard. ‘You and I will never be parted. Take a thousand francs on account to Cachan, the solicitor, but ask for a receipt. Kolb, let no power on earth wring a word from you about what I’m doing, the hours I spend away from the workshop or what you might see me bringing back. And when I send you looking for herbs – as I do – don’t let a single soul see you… My good Kolb, they’ll try to get round you and perhaps offer you a thousand or ten thousand francs if you’ll talk…’

‘Efen if zey offeret me millionss, I voult not say von vort! I vass a soltier ant I know zat orterss are orterss.’

‘Well, I’ve warned you. Off you go, and ask Monsieur Petit-Claud to witness the delivery of the money to Monsieur Cachan.’

‘Yes inteet,’ said the Alsatian. ‘Von tay I hope I vill pe rich enough to gif hiss gown a goot dustink, zat man of tchustice! I to not like hiss face!’

‘Kolb’s a good man, Madame,’ said the stout Marion. ‘He’s as strong as a horse and as mild as a lamb. Just the kind of man to make a woman happy!
And mark you, he’s the one who had the idea of investing our wages like this. He calls them
vaitches.
Poor man! He talks funny, but he thinks all right, and anyway I can always take his meaning. He’s thinking of working extra at some other job so as not to cost us anything…’

Séchard looked at his wife and said: ‘It would be worth getting rich if only to be able to reward such kind souls.’ To Eve this was a very natural idea, for she was never astonished to find other people as noble-hearted as herself. Her attitude would have shown the most stupid people, and even cold-hearted persons, what a lovely disposition she had.

‘You’ll be rich, my dear Monsieur David. Things are going to turn out all right,’ Marion exclaimed. ‘Put it like this: your father has just bought a farm and is giving you the rent for it…’

In these circumstances, were not the words Marion uttered, in order to minimize the merit of her action, a sign of exquisite tact?